I was in the wonderful WEX shop in Leeds today stocking up on film. I’m off on my travels soon and I want some good stuff to record things on. I ended up buying Ilford HP5. The thinking is that it is just fast enough to take pictures inside without a flash and just slow enough to take pictures outside in the daylight.
We’ll see how it goes.
I’m not sure ifyou should buy a camera just becuase of its looks. But then again…
The Lomomatic 110 camera is the first completely new 110 film camera to be made for a while. Lomography (who specialise in interesting cameras) released it a little while back. It’s a rather expensive alternative to a cheap second hand 110 camera, but it does have a ton of style. It also has a proper electronic shutter and a glass lens with adjustable focus - which are not things you usually find on a 110 camera. Of course, I got my hands on one and loaded it up with Lomo Purple film. It’s a fun camera to use. You wind it on by opening and closing the body and you can also attach the cutest little flash gun to the side. It is very plasticy though and I found the shutter button a bit fiddly to press (best to use a fingernail and press it with that). The 110 film has tiny negatives, but I wasn’t too unhappy with the level of detail.
This is not how I remember Dalby forsest looking…
Should have held the camera horizontal
I think the camera shake adds a lot to this one…
The camera didn’t get the colours wrong, that’s down to the awesome film. But it did get the exposure and the focus mostly right. The only times things went wrong were when I forgot to adjust a setting. I took some pictures of people and they came out sharp and snappy, but with weird colours which added a lot to the atmosphere.
It’s a nice enough camera, very stylish and beautifully presented. I’m not sure I’d advise anyone other than a camera nerd to get one though. Probably better to pick up a cheap second-hand 110 camera if you want to try the format, or perhaps a Pentax Auto 110 (which is an awesome tiny SLR camera of which more later).
What I would advise you to do though is pick up some of the funky Lomographic 110 films. They are available at quite appealing prices in 110 format and you can get them developed at around the same cost as a 35mm film. I’m presently trying the “turquoise” film (which seems to turn people cyan). I’m looking forward to seeing the results.
This one is almost artistic
A while back I made the mistake of sending the same film through the camera twice. At the time I vowed never to do that again. Well, that worked. Above you can see the results of doing it again...
The first pass was with a Canon Dial 35 and the second with a Canon AE-1. While it saves me a bit in film it has the disadvantage of leaving me with lots of unusable pictures.
I took this picture with my little Canon Dial 35 half frame camera. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.
Some of the lenses in my cameras are radioactive. Not in a particularly dangerous way, although if you managed to swallow one or left it in your underpants for several weeks it might not do you much good. As the radioactive elements decay they turn yellow, which means that some of my pictures have a yellow/gold tinge that I don’t really mind that much. It gives pictures taken in Hull a nice “French Riviera” look. The solution, when I get around to it, is to shine a bright UV light on the lens and speed up the decay process and turn the yellow white again.
Hmm. What to do…
…because if I do, I’ll buy something. Today it was a lens. But it did allow me to capture the above tense moment in a hard fought game of Pokémon.
After the first part of the operation
We had a lot of fun today drilling and sawing. We’re following these instructions to convert some Polaroid Land cameras from very old Polaroid film which is no longer made to 5x4 and Fuji Instax. The procedure is simple enough, although you do need to be careful when using the drill (and it is best if you have sharp drills). You have to remove the back of the camera, along with a pressure plate assembly which used to squeeze the chemicals onto the photographs. You then add a 3D printed back plate along with a film holder.
We need to tidy up the tape we added to make the camera light tight against the 3D printed back.
We’ve got the back off the camera, adjusted the camera focus and fitted the new back. The next step is to change the “infinity stop” on the front of the camera so that it will focus at the correct place for the Instax Film holder we are using.
This is actually of a group of people
Photography is hard. First you have to set the lens aperture and shutter speed. Then finally, you have to point the camera in the right direction. Took some pictures today using a camera which uses a “sports viewfinder” which is just a wire frame you look through in the right direction. I looked in the wrong direction and we now have a bunch of tree pictures we weren’t expecting….
You can even see me in this picture if you look carefully enough….
Up town today to take some pictures at a local “May the Fourth” Star Wars event. It was great fun. Lots of bits and bobs for sale and loads of people in character. I was using Ilford HP5 film which is fast and gives a really nice grainy effect.
You talking to me?
New dial and its inspiration
Over the weekend I bought yet another Canon Dial from those lovely folks at West Yorkshire Cameras. It was sold as “broken” from their outlet store. They handed it to me and then gave me a plastic bag holding the side rubbers which had been removed as part of an attempted repair.
I’ve been playing with it and It now works fine. All I had to do was remove the winder and free off the gears inside and add the tiniest amount of oil. Then I stuck the rubbers back on. Joy of joys, the meter works! I’m not sure what it is about these cameras that I like so much, but I’ve now got a couple that I can use which is nice.
Local Blossom
Took a colour film in to be processed today. I like doing this. It is a bit pricy I suppose, but it is my hobby, so there. And apparently you can spend an awful lot of money on golf clubs (not to mention course fees) - so there’s that. Anyhoo, they came out pretty well.
Just some trees
Hull University Wilberforce building artwork
University library looking good in the rain
These pictures are from scans that I got when the film was processed. I think they look pretty good, although the physical prints look even nicer. They aren’t particularly high resolution but I’ve found it pretty much impossible to make better ones with my own scanner.
Not bad for a fifty year old camera
It’s number one son’s fault. He told me about the Buyee site which lets you bid in Japanese auctions. I’ve been after an Olympus Pen EES (with manual focus) for a while and so I took a look. They had one on there priced at 27 quids. Very good condition and with a “working” exposure meter. So I bought it. The price is impressive for a camera like this; although I did have to pay another 27 quids for postage and packing.
The service is very good. The Japanese seller of the camera sends it to the Buyee warehouse in Japan where it can be stored for up to a month. If I bought any other bits and bobs they could have been sent there too and then all combined for shipping. As I was just buying the one camera I had it shipped out as soon as possible. It took four or five days to arrive and the whole process was very smooth. I’ve had orders from ebay which have taken longer. The order didn’t attract any import duty and I was able to use the Japan Post website to track the package all the way to being out for deliver by Royal Mail Parcelforce.
The camera arrived today and (of course) doesn’t quite work properly. The exposure meter isn’t working and the aperture is stuck at F22. But I don’t mind. It will take pictures (although I’ve yet to develop them). Even if I have to spend a few quids to get it fixed or brave going inside and fixing it myself I’ve still got a camera in extremely good condition. The site sells a huge variety of stuff, some of it at very interesting prices. I don’t think I’ll be buying things every week, but it is nice to have the option if I want to get something which is a bit out of the ordinary.
Close but no cigar
As part of the fixing of the Canon Dial camera I needed a spanner to remove the dial spring winder. The spanner is a bit special because it needs to fit between the winder and the camera body. Ivan was kind enough to make me one out of brass, but it turned out to be a little bit too thick. So I thought I’d 3D print one. I’ve been impressed with how tough PETG prints have turned out, and the spanner doesn’t have to be particularly strong, so I was hopeful this might work.
And, since I’m lazy I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to produce the spanner design as a Python program I can run inside FreeCAD. I asked the question and out popped some Python. Which didn’t work. There then followed around fifteen minutes of me explaining why the supplied design was wrong, followed by ChatGPT then producing a differently wrong result along with an explanation of how it had fixed the faults that were still there.
Eventually I gave up and wrote the design in about five minutes or so. These things are very clever, but if they get it wrong it seems that sometimes it stays wrong whatever you do.
The spanners worked a treat, although I had to make a really thin one
Those tiny little dots in the plastic bag in the middle are the screws that hold the winder in place
I’m not sure if people really want to know the saga of my Canon Dial 35. But it’s my blog. So there.
Anyhoo, today I thought I’d get to the bottom of the the sluggish way that the camera was winding on after each photograph. I was able to take the winder off the bottom of the camera and use a whole bunch of cotton buds to clean muck off the inside. I then added a tiny bit of oil (too much oil is a really bad thing in cameras like this) and then put it all together.
And it works. Go me. The wind on is now very smooth and positive.
The camera takes half frames across the film
My latest new (to me) camera arrived today. It’s my third Canon Dial 35. An it looks like third time really is a charm. The camera works quite well, although the clockwork winder does chug a little bit after a few frames. The light meter works perfectly for me - I just gave the terminals a bit of clean and off it went. The pictures are lovely and sharp.
The pictures are half the size of standard 35mm ones but this does mean I’ll get twice as many shots on each film.
And now I have to find a new obsession.
The film on the top was a cassette test
When I developed the pictures I took yesterday I actually had three different film sizes in the same developing tank. Fortunately they all needed the same development time.
This is becomming my test shot for new cameras…
I put a film into “Mr Sticky Shutter” today and took him to the University. He is one of my 20 cameras and he shows quite a bit of promise. His shutter is a bit sticky, but only at the slower speeds that I hardly ever use. But the good news is that he looks excellent and everything else, including the light meter, works fine. And, as you can see above, the lens is very sharp
Brickwork is very good for testing the detail that a lens can resolve
Not bad for a sixty year old camera
For the last few days I’ve been working on an article about using a Minox camera. I’ve managed to prove two things conclusively:
You can 3D print a light tight cassette to hold Minox film.
You do need to put something in the light trap to stop light getting onto the film.
This means I’ve been spending a while with my hands in a light-proof bag, rolling up film and putting it into tiny cassettes. I was happily doing this the other day when the doorbell rang. I was alone in the house at the time and half-way through a rather tricky cassette load, so I had to walk to the door with my hands in the black bag, find the keys and then open it to reveal two people who asked me if I wanted them to save my soul. Or something. I replied politely that I’d settle for having the films in the dark bag saved and bade them farewell.
I’m kind of hoping they will go back to base with tales of a strange, wild-eyed man who lives at our address and answers the door with his hands in a large black bag. With a bit of luck they’ll skip our house next time.
..all photographed with a phone…
It turns out I’ve not bought 19 broken cameras. I’ve actually received 20. I’ve tested each one and they are all broken. I’ve given them all names.
Mr Sticky Shutter
No Rewind Boy
Just Dead
Weird battery guy
Stuckee
The Battery Flattener
The Dangly Back Kid
Sir NoClick
The one that winds forever
The one with the stuck frame counter
Flash but no trousers
Missing buttons
Shiny but bust
Only clicks, never whirrs
Nothing moves
Chinon less wonder
Is this the end of Ricoh?
T’would be nice if this worked
Shiny but that’s it
Mr. Dial
The Canon Dial that I really wanted does more than my previous purchase, but there is still something broken about it. I’ve been looking at the repair manuals for these cameras and they are packed full of parts which are easy to break and hard to mend. So for now the quest continues….
I was digging around for information about the Canon Dial 35 and I discovered that it was used to take an award winning photograph of Leslie Nielsen as part of an advertising campaign for Red Rock Cider. I haven’t been able to track down the picture, but I have managed to find a collection of the adverts. Well worth a watch. Back when advertising was clever and funny.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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